This invention relates to documentation systems, and in particular to a system for documenting mapping among message formats in multiple applications. Applications referred to in this document include packaged applications (ERP), middleware, application servers, databases, electronic data interchange (EDI), and communication over the Internet.
Both individuals and businesses today rely heavily on application software for storing and organizing many kinds of information. Businesses typically maintain numerous databases and applications for storing different kinds of information, such as customer identification, supplier names, accounting data, project completion schedules, employee records, etc. Often a business will wish to link information in one application with information in another application to maintain coherency of the data or enable employees to perform their work more easily. Furthermore, it is increasingly common for different companies, such as vendors and customers, to wish to link their applications together so that information about each company can be made available to the other company to further their joint business needs.
The linking of such disparate applications has been a manually intensive task requiring extensive consulting support from skilled professionals. In typical prior approaches to linking the disparate applications, the companies each hire consultants to document their business message formats, typically using spreadsheets. Each company""s spreadsheet documents the fields in its own various applications, including the name of the field, its type (for example integer, text, date, etc.), its length, etc. Then the consultants from both sides meet to discuss translating from one message format to another. The end result is another spreadsheet which specifies the mapping rules for the exchange of information between the two companies. These mapping rules are then entered into a translator product which performs the run time execution of translating from one format to the other, formerly incoinpatible, format. The documentation process for maintaining records of the message translation performed has thus been entirely manual. In a typical project perhaps five days of consulting would be required to finish a single mapping.
What is needed, therefore, is a process which enables easier, and more productive, maintaining of documentation relating to the mapping among the disparate applications.
This invention relates to techniques for improving the efficiency of maintaining the records of mapping among different applications. The efficiency of documentation is improved by creating a visual representation of the source application objects and the target application objects which allows the user of the system to document the translation rules through a user friendly graphical user interface. Such a system substantially reduces the integration planning time, and readily supports mapping among many disparate types of application systems.
In a preferred embodiment a method of documenting linkage of at least two applications to each other includes the steps of displaying in the side panel on a screen, source application objects and displaying in the top panel, target application objects. At selected intersection points of the source application objects and the target application objects the user of the system inserts cells which define the mapping rules relating the source application objects to the target application objects. Such cells typically include a description of the fields of the source object and the fields of the target object, together with an indication of the mapping relationship between desired ones of the source and target fields. Such cells also preferably include a unique identification field which identifies the particular mapping relationship between the designated fields.